Individuals and organizations often desire to store large amounts of data in formats that are efficient and convenient for use. For example, conventional storage systems may extract data from a physical hard drive and store it within a virtual hard drive.
Virtual hard drives may provide various efficiency and convenience improvements over traditional, physical hard drives. For example, virtual hard drives may be quickly and seamlessly transmitted or shared through a computer network instead of being physically transported like a physical hard disk. Virtual hard drives may also enable a single physical hard drive or machine to simulate a machine having multiple hard drives. In some cases, a user may quickly and seamlessly switch between virtual hard drives and/or boot machines from one or more virtual hard drives.
Despite the advantages discussed above, virtual hard drives may suffer from a number of inefficiencies. For example, virtual hard drives often contain large amounts of data, and creating a virtual hard drive may involve copying large amounts of data over an extended period of time. Moreover, different virtual hard drives may have different structures or formats, which may prevent their underlying content from being unified or used together in a quick and seamless manner. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies a need for improved methods for synthesizing virtual hard drives.